Way the Crow Flies (20 page)

“Tell me a story, Dad,” she says, using as mature a voice as possible.

“It’s late, old buddy, you have to be fresh as a daisy tomorrow to start grade four.”

Four. A benevolent number, brown and reasonable. Her school dress and ankle socks are laid out over a chair with her new shoes on the floor. It’s as though she herself had sat down in the chair and disappeared, leaving only her clothes.

“Just one story, Dad, please.” She still has her arms around his neck from when he leaned down to kiss her good night, he is her prisoner.

“Just one,” he says.

“Tell me the story of the crash.”

“Why do you want to hear that again, why don’t we read….” And he reaches for her
Treasury of Fairytales
.

“No Dad, the crash.” This is not a once-upon-a-time type of evening.

“All right then. But after that,
schlafen.”

There are some stories you can never hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them—but you are not. That’s one reliable way of understanding time.

He sits on the edge of her bed. “It was right here in Centralia….”

The story of the crash is already changing with you; it used to begin,
It was on a little training station called Centralia, way out in the back of beyond
.

“I was flying lead in formation….” At the controls of his Anson trainer. Getting ready to join a bomber stream sixty miles long over the English Channel.

Madeleine rests her cheek on the pillow and gazes at his belt buckle, a fly perfectly preserved in amber. It’s good to gaze at an object and listen to a story.

“I was coming in for a landing….” In a month he’d be flying ops. At the controls of a Lancaster bomber—a real beauty of a beast. Suited up in full gear complete with Mae West—the buxom life-preserver for those fortunate enough to bail out over water.

“I was on final approach….” Four other aircraft were set to land after him. Normally he would have a small crew in training on board but that day he was alone.

“I was flying the old twin-engine Anson….” A very forgiving little aircraft, unless you’re ground-looping on the tarmac—lovely in the sky, but a handful on the ground.

“The sky was clear as a bell….” It’s overcast but the ceiling is high, visibility good. Most pilots will fly their missions in clear moonlight over the Channel, slow and heavy with six tons of bombs to put on the target five hours away. They’ll see their own shadows rippling across the grey sea below while watching for German fighters, Messerschmitts mainly, as the crust of Europe comes into view: patchwork fields and spires below like a diorama, visibility augmented by the criss-crossing cones of German searchlights, by the flames of each other’s airplanes caught in the sticky web of light, the spritz and arc of anti-aircraft fire. And far below, their bombs tilting away, tumbling like dominoes toward earth, ending in soundless puffs of smoke. Some will make it back to Yorkshire—better to be hit on the way back, with less fuel and an empty bomb bay. If they’re lucky enough to be hit but remain airworthy, they might be able to put out the flames by diving. If not, and they’re lucky enough still to be alive, they and their crew might be able to squeeze past the equipment that crowds the narrow cabin and try to get out, climbing up the aircraft as it spins earthward. They rarely think about this. No one talks about it.

“I got clearance from the tower, so I banked left and started bringing her in for a landing….” This time next month I’ll be in England.

“Down below on the tarmac I saw another Anson rolling away from the flight line, and I took it for granted he was headed for the taxiway….” The airstrips are black with recent rain but it isn’t raining now, a bit slippery, no big deal. His worst fear has been that he will be sentenced to instructor school rather than posted overseas—the trick is to be good, but not too good….

“At about a hundred and fifty feet I saw the Anson roll past the taxiway and turn onto the runway right smack dab where I was headed….” Unconcerned as a bug on a leaf, the yellow aircraft below makes a slow right turn onto the runway and begins to pick up speed. “And I said to myself, what the heck is he doing?”
Something’s fouled up
. “But there wasn’t much time to think….” Too late for Jack to go around again, and at one hundred feet a decision occurs in his central nervous system, causing his hand to pull up hard and lean right on the stick. “I figured I’d pour on the power, bank and get the nose up….” His aircraft responds with sixty degrees to the left but no altitude; he is too low and slow for that at fifty feet. His port wing clips the edge of the landing strip, he cartwheels into the field, yellow plywood splintering off in all directions,
let her go
, he thinks,
less to catch fire
, he thinks, because at that point he has plenty of time to think, five spinning seconds. “But she spun in and there I was, tail over teakettle in the field.”

What is left of his aircraft jams to a stop up on its nose in the dirt. At some point his head has snapped forward into the instrument panel—“I got a pretty good bump on the head”—the knob of the radio dial, most likely. It has all but taken out his eye. “But somebody up there likes me, I thought….” Had he been operational at the time of the accident, he’d have kept his aircrew category—

Madeleine says, “But your eye was bleeding.”

“Well I didn’t know that then, I just figured I’d banged my head.”

—twenty-twenty is nice but not essential, that’s why you fly with a crew. All you really have to be able to see is your instrument panel, and Jack can see it fine, it’s bent into itself below him. He is suspended over it by his seat belt, big drops of blood are splashing
onto the shattered dial faces, the fuel gauge reads low and that’s good news, where is the blood coming from? He touches his face. There’s a storm raging behind his left eye—

“And Uncle Simon rescued you,” says Madeleine.

“That’s right.”

A sound like a heavy zipper—Simon slices him out of his seat belt and hauls him out. Jack feels the earth travelling backwards beneath his butt—there are his boots bouncing along in front of him, how long have we been travelling like this?

“Simon saw the accident and he was the first one across the field.”

Grass rippling past, a pair of elbows hooked under his armpits.

There’s been an accident
, Jack hears his own voice.

Yes you foolish bastard, there’s been a fucking accident
.

Hi Si. Sorry, sir
.

He hears Simon laugh at the same moment as he glances up to see his yellow airplane—in a headstand twenty-five feet away, skeleton wings drooping—burst into flames like a flower unfolding, burning pollen on the air.

He wakes up in the infirmary. Why is the nurse smiling? Why does Simon offer him a shot of whiskey?

“You did the right thing, mate.”

What is there to celebrate? His war is over. It ended thirty yards south of the runway at Number 9 Service Flying Training School, Centralia Aerodrome, April 7, 1943. SNAFU.
Situation Normal All Fouled Up
.

“And you got a medal,” says Madeleine.

“That’s right, I got my gong.”

“But you couldn’t fly any more.”

“Nope, but it turned out for the best ’cause otherwise I never would have met Maman and you never would have been born, and what would I do without my
Deutsches Mädchen?”
Jack gets up from the bed and leans to tuck the blankets around her.

“Dad, tell the story of Jack and Mimi.”

He laughs. “We said one story.”

“But it is one story, it’s part of the story.”

“You’re going to be a lawyer when you grow up.” He switches off the light.

“Dad, what was the name of that place again?”

“What place?”

“Where Johnny said Hitler’s secret weapon was?”

“Johnny …? Oh, that was Peenemünde.”

Pain Amunda
. The name sounds like needles. “Did the Germans capture her?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“Did they torture her?”

“No, no … she got away.” He slips out the door.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“What would’ve happened if you died in the crash?”

“… I didn’t die.”

“But what if?”

“Well. You wouldn’t have been born.”

“Where would I be?”

“I don’t think you’d be anywhere.”

What is worse? Being dead? Or not being born? How come we’re afraid to die, but we’re not afraid of before we were born? “Dad—?”

“Have a good sleep, sweetie, think nice thoughts.”

Jack closes her door halfway, to allow light from the hall to spill into her room. He goes to his bedroom and crosses to his dresser without switching on the light. That other Anson never should have been cleared for takeoff. The Air Force Cross was in recognition of his decision, in disregard of his own safety, to peel left into a certain crash, rather than risk trying to overtake the aircraft on the ground and land in front of it—a risk that, had it resulted in a collision with the fuelled-up airplane, would have killed its pilot, its instructor, its student navigator and its wireless operator. Along with Jack.
For valour, courage and devotion to duty whilst flying, though not in active operations against the enemy
. Jack reaches into his drawer and finds what he’s looking for.

He crosses the hall to his son’s room. On the wall, the Canadian Golden Hawks fly in formation, their gold and red Sabre jets in a starburst. Below the picture, the bed is neatly made, the boy is no slouch. He shakes his head at the new poster, however; where did he
get that thing?
The United States Marine Corps Wants You
. Jack has a back-to-school gift for his son: a brand-new “RCAF 4 Fighter Wing” baseball cap from the boy’s old team in Germany. He tosses it onto the bed and it bounces. Regulation corners. He smiles and heads downstairs.

His wife and son are sitting at the kitchen table playing gin rummy. Mimi gets up and puts the kettle on. “Jack, would you like a cup of tea?”

He finds his copy of
Time
among Mimi’s women’s magazines with their hairdos and recipes, and relaxes on the couch. In East Berlin a boy is shot attempting to escape over the “Wall of Shame” and takes an hour to die while people on the west side scream across at the guards to do something. He flips through—the sound of his wife and son chatting in the kitchen is all the more soothing because Jack doesn’t understand French—President Kennedy in swim trunks, surrounded by women in bikinis. Infighting at NASA. Jackie Kennedy on waterskis. From the kitchen comes the whistle of the teakettle. Rockets and bikinis, what’s the world coming to? Wernher von Braun demonstrates the Saturn booster engine for the President. U.S. military advisers are helping the South Vietnamese in “the most successful operation yet carried out against the Communist Viet Cong.” Rocket-size crates on the Havana docks….

Mimi places a cup and saucer on the side table next to him. He registers its arrival as though from a great distance—from the blackness of outer space, so that his failure to say thanks is not rudeness, merely a consequence of a law of physics.
Time’s
view is that Castro could have been easily “erased” if only Kennedy had properly backed the Bay of Pigs invasion last April, which it now terms “a synonym for fiasco.” Jack reaches for his cup. The pundits at
Time
think Kennedy is being soft on Communism, but what do they suggest? An unprovoked invasion? We might as well become Soviet citizens if we’re going to adopt their tactics. He turns the page.
“OPINION Toward the Year 2000. The U.S. will defend Canada whether Canada likes it or not….”

“Jack?”

“What’s that?” He looks up from his magazine as though surfacing from sleep.

Mimi is standing over him with the tea pot. She says, “I said, do you want some hot?” “Oh. Oh, yeah.
Merci.”

In Madeleine’s room the ceramic face of a little Bavarian boy, surprised by a bumblebee on his nose, shields the night light. Tomorrow is the first day of school, the dawn of a bright new era. She closes her eyes. Colours flit rapidly behind her lids. She floats up, the bed listing like a sailboat. Was there really such a person as Peter Pan? If you believe hard enough, will you hear him crowing? Are there still talking ravens?
When I grow up I will have a dog. I will have a red sportscar
. The bed slips gently down the stream …
when I grow up…
.

T
HE CROWS WAITED
until things had cooled down there. When the blue dress with the girl inside it had become just that, they dropped down—one, two, a third—to stand at a polite distance. And began to work the charms. Tug. Tugging at the bracelet. And one charm was free. The successful crow rose into the air with a flashing silver prize in its beak. Her name. Then the others flew away, and she was left alone.